1 in 25

For every 25 people condemned to death in the United States one of them is innocent. Most of those innocent people had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment and their cases no longer receive the scrutiny death penalty cases receive.

So says a new study published by the National Academy of Sciences.

"If all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4.1% would be exonerated," study authors write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States." Click here to read the study itself.

The great majority of innocent people who are sentenced to death are never identified and freed, says professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law School, the study's lead author, in an article by the AP.

The difficulty in identifying innocent prisoners stems from the fact that more than 60 percent of prisoners in death penalty cases ultimately are removed from death row and re-sentenced to life imprisonment. Once that happens, their cases no longer receive the exhaustive reviews that the legal system provides for those on death row, the study concludes.

"The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution," says the study. "But most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and re-sentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply."

970 and Counting

In North Carolina we have more than 970 resolutions to repeal the death penalty! Most are from locally owned businesses in all 100 counties. We are very grateful to these local business owners who are willing to speak out for their communities and their state.

July 10 is the 160th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Wisconsin. This sets Wisconsin apart from other jurisdictions. Nationally, Wisconsin law has been completely without the death penalty longer than the laws of any other state. Wisconsin also has been without the death penalty longer than any European country (even longer than the Vatican).